What is trauma therapy? What is resilience and more importantly, what is the goal of trauma therapy? Today I talk with trauma specialist Dr. Alexa Altman about all things trauma therapy and wellness. We decided to start by defining trauma. Trauma is when we are bumped out of our resilient zone, meaning that we do not have the tools to calm ourselves back down and keep moving forward. Instead we may go into fight, flight or freeze in order to get through it. Our fight and flight responses are what mobilizes us to protect ourselves. It helps in the moment, but if that response continues for a long time and we don’t get any reprieve from it, that would be when we would diagnose PTSD or C-PTSD. If we are unable to run away or fight back we may go into a freeze response. Alexa explains this as dissociation or feeling like we are cut off from all that is going on. Just like fight or flight, this helps us survive what is going on because the other 2 options are not available. The whole goal of trauma therapy is to practice bringing ourself out of fight ,flight or freeze and back into the resilient zone. The more we do that the better we get at it and the larger our resilient zone gets. Then we are able to handle more and more life stressors without getting thrown off or bumped out of our resilient zone. I hope this was helpful, and as always please share! Alexa and I filmed many more videos that will come out each Monday this month! My hope is that her expertise helps you better understand trauma and how we can work to overcome it. xox
My video on EMDR: https://youtu.be/HhaWIVK6ERIMERCH! I’m Kati Morton, a licensed therapist making Mental Health videos! JOURNALING CLUB Every Tuesday & Friday I post a journal prompt to help keep you motivated and working on yourself. https://www.youtube.com/katimorton/join Ordering my book “Are u ok?” http://bit.ly/2s0mULy